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Mark Steyn

Sandy and Benghazi: The unseriousness of Obama

Back in Benghazi, the president who looks so cool in a bomber jacket declined to answer his beleaguered diplomats’ calls for help — even though he had aircraft and special forces in the region. Too bad. He’s all jacket and no bombers. This, too, is an example of America’s uniquely profligate impotence. When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite special forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action? What is the point of outspending Russia, Britain, France, China, Germany, and every middle-rank military power combined if, when it matters, America cannot urge into the air one plane with a couple of dozen commandos? In Iraq, al-Qaeda is running training camps in the western desert. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are all but certain to return most of the country to its pre-9/11 glories. But in Washington the head of the world’s biggest “counterterrorism” bureaucracy briefs the president on flood damage and downed trees.

I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try — and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate on Tuesday.

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I don’t know whether Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan can fix things, but I do know that Barack Obama and Joe Biden won’t even try — and that therefore a vote for Obama is a vote for the certainty of national collapse. Look at Lower Manhattan in the dark, and try to imagine what America might look like after the rest of the planet decides it no longer needs the dollar as global reserve currency. For four years, we have had a president who can spend everything but build nothing. Nothing but debt, dependency, and decay. As I said at the beginning, in different ways the response to Hurricane Sandy and Benghazi exemplify the fundamental unseriousness of the superpower at twilight. Whether or not to get serious is the choice facing the electorate on Tuesday.

Obama hasn’t accomplished one positive thing, with the exception of allowing our military to kill Osama. At least Clinton had the V-Chip, midnight basketball and school uniforms in his accomplishments column.

I’m sure nathor will be along any time now to assure us Benghazi isn’t an issue. Even though 44 percent of Americans polled said that Obama has misled them on the supposed non-issue-that-they-aren’t-supposed-to-know-about-because-they-only-watch-the-MSM-and-the-MSM-decided-it-isn’t-important.

Again, you need to look to foreigners (in this case a Canadian) for straight reporting.

Russia Today and The Mail Online will tell you more about America than the MSM. As will Al Jazeera. The first is pretty much anti-US, the second looks at the US as a novelty, and the third is certainly anti-US.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government’s ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states — because your president spent 6 trillion bucks and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

By doing all this, the president “shows” he “cares” — which is true in the sense that in Benghazi he was willing to leave the entire consulate staff behind, and nobody had their calls answered within seven hours, because presumably he didn’t care. he was busy in the situation room tweeting his pictures.

He’s right. We collect a huge amount of tax in this country. More than the GDPs of all but a few states. And then we send a huge portion of it out the door to the things Steyn mentioned, and all those people getting social security paychecks for their “chronic anxiety” disability. If you’re concerned about our failing infrastructure, vote Republican to get our entitlement spending under control.

I wonder how many of the various power outages were due to sabotage for political purposes or simply for federal money. I’m happy the poorer neighborhoods in the storm zone haven’t burned down their cities because we’d be on the hook to rebuild them and give all the residents free debit cards.

What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite special forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action?

This assumes the President at some level simply did a poor job

The assumption is extrapolated from the fact the President has refused to get involved in detailing who said what, when. i.e. dodging the questions implies culpability

The assumption is also driven by the fact most Americans cannot consider the possibility the President might have been playing political games with the lives of government employees, and the games blew up in his face.

If the President had simply wanted to go to sleep early, like the famous captain in the Titanic story, or hesitated to take on military action before an election, or let himself be talked into inaction, he might well dodge the questions later, but there is no reason he would run with the video hoax for two weeks when the story had no chance of standing scrutiny.

The video does not fit the assumptions.

This is why the rumor the attack might have been a setup for a hostage trade to spike the election has legs. The video could be turned into the enemy Obama could vanquish, and the hostage trade could hand the Brotherhood their sheik, and make Obama the rescuer of American prisoners. Except someone decided to ignore orders and try a rescue, and the hostage died, leaving little but a video. Have a riot, please.

The rumor does not have to be true, but the problem is it fits better then trying to explain the video hoax for any other reason.

With the American military might, and the real time security info, even a community agitator can do a pretty decent job by letting the system handle it, as was seen with the bin Laden kill

While buried power lines are esthetically nice, they are no guarantee against power outages. At some point there is going to be power above ground. You can’t bury main transmission lines, and they can go down too. Here in MN most suburbs have buried power in neighborhoods, but in lightning storms we still have occasional power outages. Although they don’t last very long, a few hours at most.

I don’t know of any areas that have taken above ground power and put it under ground, they only do it in new areas, or in areas where the power has to be disrupted for other reasons like major road or utility construction. Otherwise the cost is seen as prohibitive.